Recently, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton came under scrutiny when she appeared to collapse after attending a 9/11 memorial service.
Hillary’s camp soon announced that she was suffering from a bout of pneumonia and would make a quick recovery and be back on the campaign trail. The truth of it is, according to her doctor, Clinton had been fighting this infection for a brief period of time.
And it’s no wonder Clinton got sick. According to Catherine Forest, a clinical researcher at Stanford medicine, pneumonia is community acquired, meaning you can catch it from simply being out in the world among other people.
Forest says, “You’re more likely to get it if you’re not getting enough sleep. Or because of heat, or physical exertion, or stress. Or being on airplanes a lot, since that means being in closer proximity to people who might already be infected.”
Which means that campaigning for president is the perfect recipe for catching the virus.
Couple that with the fact that Clinton is four times more likely to contract the disease because she is over 65 and the fact that she has had no recovery time due to her schedule, and it is no wonder she felt weak at the 9/11 memorial.
The entire episode with the illness has become a political spectacle with people now saying Clinton is not fit to be president over her health, despite the assurance of many doctors to the contrary.
We as a country have a disease.
During heated elections, we tend to make the nonpolitical, political. We are prone to taking the mundane everyday occurrences in a candidate’s life and analyzing them under the most ultimate public scrutiny.
And Clinton is not the only one who has had the nonpolitical turned political.
Republican candidate Donald Trump has also faced criticism of his body shape and weight, his hair, and his “orange” skin. People turn them into political reasons for why they are not voting for Trump.
It is high time that we in America start looking at the real issues that the candidates support, the ones they denounce and base our decisions on who we feel most represents the beliefs we hold dear.
